


Another Place, Another Time - Volume 2

by gentlearmor



Series: Another Place, Another Time [2]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: No Beta, i'm sorry in advance, mentions of child brides, please, please look at the tags of the first part if you want an idea of how bad this will get, please please pretty please, ratings and warnings will evolve like in the first part, this is not meant to be happy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:26:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23903818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gentlearmor/pseuds/gentlearmor
Summary: While the abused prince lay dormant as his body is sapped for its power, those who remain scheme, run, and plot to try to free him, themselves, and the world of the brutal, abusive, oppressive Empire.
Series: Another Place, Another Time [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1722991
Comments: 2
Kudos: 15





	Another Place, Another Time - Volume 2

**Author's Note:**

> NOTE: So, like I mentioned in the ending author’s note of the previous part of this, I might end up tweaking facts here and there, for any number of reasons. This chapter will be spent as a sort of recap, so if you see immediate differences, this is the place!
> 
> **As with all my stories, I rate based on what HAS happened, not what I plan to have happen. As of right now, this is tame. If you don't want to read the whole of the first part, at least look at its tags if you want an idea of where this one may go.**
> 
> Anyway... Jesus, a lot of things suddenly changed hardcore real fast after the last updates. More personal losses and the world blew up.
> 
> I hope you’re all well in isolation. I'm going to try to write on things so maybe someone will have way, way too much time on their hands because Resident Evil is trying to come to life, have something to do.
> 
> I will always take requests in the comments, or by email for now because of the extraordinary circumstances and I know how hard it is: gentlearmor@gmail.com

The lake was gorgeous, shimmering with copper and violet from the sky holding a setting sun. Several catoblepas loped around in the distance, digging through the water with their massive tusks and paying no mind to the small gathering just the right of him. Why would they care? The giant beasts were nearly impenetrable in skin, unparalleled in strength.

“Man, this is so boring.”

He looked to his arms. There were burns spiraling over his limbs, like red ribbons seared into his skin.

“Speak for yourself. I’m having a blast!”

At times, he felt the sensation of Ignis’s body exploding onto him at the dinner table. He had to stop to slap at his face, even though nothing was there. He hadn’t even been in the primary path, but that image stuck with him, what little hit him stayed with him. Haunted him. He placed himself on the other side of the table, felt hot parts dripping down his skin. More than had been. Gore, wet and chunky and red and white…

“Hey, at least it’s a damn pretty sight.”

He wondered if the others were okay in the wake of all that happened.

“It’s certainly a different form of beauty than we will find once we reach Altissia. We truly should start heading to Cape Caem if we’re to make it out on time tomorrow morning.”

He wondered what became of his body. He was clearly asleep, but yet he felt so tired. He understood the Carbuncle’s explanation of what his body was being used for, but he wondered how. What they were doing to make him a literal power source?

“Hang on—I just got something!”

The Carbuncle was convinced there was something to be learned in that dreamworld, and kept him there all the time at that point, while insisting he was plotting out other places for learning, but that it would take time. Questions about helping him wake up, like when he was a kid, were brushed aside with a quiet, “It’ll come.”

Noctis wasn’t sure what he could learn from a version of him that never had the same experience he had, but he didn’t argue. He had nothing else to do.

He looked over at his other self. A bit older, a lot healthier. He smiled and he spoke. He had a bit of an attitude at times, but he understood the language of himself, and could tell that attitude came because that one knew his people could handle it.

That Noctis Lucis Caelum was… everything the one observing in his invisibility wished he could be. He knew the pain of losing his father, losing his kingdom, but he was older and stronger when it happened. He was with his retainers who held the Power of the King within them through the rite he’d been told as a kid would go to Gladio and Ignis, and whomever else he deemed worthy. For the other, it was the young man who killed Ignis. Prompto Argentum, he’d learned there.

Instead of a calculating, silent assassin for the Empire, that Prompto was cheerful and reliable. He was loyal almost to a fault to the others. Still talented with guns, he was less deadly than the one back home. There was a sadness to him that he only showed when he thought no one was looking. Noctis actually pitied him. He wondered if it was from something that led the other into the hands of the Empire back in reality.

Gladiolus was also stronger, larger, more impressive. He was just like the Gladio back home, but instead of airing that charm in the name of lowering the guard of the Imperials around him, so he could keep his ear in circles the other two couldn’t, that one’s charm was genuine. He could make anyone comfortable. Even with such a larger and imposing demeanor, even the smallest woman seemed to loosen up after just a couple of minutes talking to him.

Ignis was still Ignis. Always overthinking, always on top of things. Always assessing the situation for the safest way to do something, to keep Noctis out of harm’s way. The difference was that that Ignis had the authority, education and strength to make his motions meaningful. He hadn’t been stripped of years of vital education and training, leaving him with only his most innate common sense to navigate the world around him and his prince. He was imposing in his own right. One could see that everything he did had rows of processes going on in his mind. Calculating and confident. It was a shame that was taken from his own Ignis…

As the king, as he thought of his doppelganger—since that one was, in fact, a king, due to the felling of his father mere weeks, perhaps even days, ago—brought his catch out of the water, he revealed it to be some decently sized fish with golden scales and yellow fins.

He carried himself like a man, in the view of the frailer version. Able to hold in pain to be light for his friends. But like Prompto, he too allowed the pain to show its true self when he thought he was alone.

“Whoa, that’s a new one!” Prompto gasped, eyes huge and forgetting about his complaints of boredom moments before. He jumped to his feet and rushed over to look at the fish. He was definitely the same as the sad little boy Noctis saw in elementary school. He wondered if, if not for the Empire, they would have been friends, too. “Let me get a picture!” he directed, allowing his camera to materialize in his hands, and stepping back to the edge of the dock.

“Careful that you don’t fall, Prompto,” Gladio ordered.

“Yessir!”

He wondered if the Prompto in reality could be salvaged. Was that what the Carbuncle wanted him to see? It couldn’t possibly be just that…

After getting the picture, the fish was stored away in the armiger, along with the rest of the king’s fishing equipment, and they started to trek away from that dock. Noctis took a deep breath and stood, his limbs radiating in pain from those burns, and when to follow them. The Carbuncle said to stay with them as long as he could, and to listen to everything they had to say.

“We ought to camp since it’s about to get dark,” Ignis suggested.

“Nah, we’ll be fine if you drive fast,” the king insisted passively.

“Excuse me? I am not driving eighty miles per hour at night as you’re prone to do.”

“We always make it alive, don’t we?”

“You take years off my life.”

“Pfft, we all know you’re going to live forever, Ignis. Driven by the power of ensuring I even die with all my buttons on my shirt, and vegetables in my stomach. Ergo, a miserable, slow death.”

That banter continued as they approached their ride: The Regalia. A car the Empire had claimed for their own and a car that the Emperor took great pleasure out of forcing him to watch as it was dismantled, and every piece taken off then subjected to drills, sledge hammers or torches. That was a piece of history to his father, and destroying it was the last step of making certain Noctis had no more hope or connection directly to his family.

From what he gathered, it was given to the king as a gift from his version of Regis, to escort him and his party to Altissia, Accordo, where he was due to get married to Luna. Although originally presented as a piece of a bigger peace agreement with the Empire, the whole thing had been a lie and ended with Insomnia in ruins and the king and his friends on the run. But they were still headed for Altissia, for Luna. At least there, the emperor hadn’t taken her for a child bride. Hadn’t abused her by that action alone…

When they reached the car, Noctis crawled onto the back of it. His doing so generated no reaction from the car, therefore there was no indication he was there. He was nothing but a ghost in his own dream. Something that wouldn’t scare them too bad if they had been real, being Lucian. The idea of evil spirits was always unnerving, but the idea of the harmless, wandering dead wasn’t intimidating to the average Lucian, particularly those from Insomnia. They wouldn’t be very good worshipers of Etro if they had fear of all the dead.

The four piled in and started on, with Ignis finally winning that they should stop in Lestallum for the night, and make haste the minute the sun started to rise, so as to not ‘keep Cor, Monica and Cid waiting’. Two of those names were names Noctis hadn’t heard in a very long time, and it made him a little homesick for his childhood. He was so empty inside anymore that he hadn’t felt such pangs in ages. But hearing it from such a strong and level ‘what if’ group of his own… it was very different. It was reminder of exactly how much was lost, and what could have been.

“Remember, you gotta make sure to kiss Lady Lunafreya’s ass first thing when we get to her,” Gladio advised the king, resting back to get as comfortable as he could in the confines of the the car.

“Yeah,” the king agreed. Noctis wondered what that meant.

“Noct’s probably looking forward to it!” Prompto cackled. The king leaned forward and pulled the blond’s ear, while Gladiolus laughed. Ignis just let out a sigh at the immaturity.

They settled down soon after that.

His wondering of their meaning about thanking Luna came in the form of the blond boy, who turned in his seat up front and sat up on his knees. “I wonder if the Titan’s body is still there since he decided to agree to help you.”

“I dunno. I don’t think we could get back there if we wanted to, to check it out,” Noctis replied.

“At least he’s with you, with Ramuh too.”

“Yeah. Luna made sure of that.”

“I wonder what’s become of Ifrit,” Ignis said thoughtfully. “He was said to be at rest atop Ravatogh, but clearly he wasn’t when we arrived.”

“I dunno. I haven’t received any calls by him, and Gentiana hasn’t said anything, so maybe he’s not there. Maybe he woke up,” the king said passively, watching the darkening, passing scenery.

Noctis listened with interest, paying no mind to how Ignis’s acceleration had no effect on his sitting loosely on the trunk. The Astrals were alive there? They were helping—they were _united_ with the king in his fight?

“What I wanna know is what was the point in tryna get Titan’s approval before the Empire took ‘im out if that body didn’t mean anything?” Gladio asked. “We worked way the hell harder than we had to.”

“The way I see it, them presuming the Astrals have a single form bodes well for us,” Ignis said thoughtfully.

“How so?” Prompto asked.

“’Cause they won’t look for them anymore once they think they’re gone,” the king said, sounding bland and bored.

“Precisely. Granted, there’s no confirmation if Noct will earn their favor in their ethereal forms, but that doesn’t bode well for the Glacian’s favor,” Ignis went on to say. “What I’ve heard is hardly fact, but there’s been rumors she was the first they fought and killed.”

“Maybe they just drop the bodies so the bodies can hibernate again,” Gladio added thoughtfully.

“Perhaps.”

“So wait. The Citadel had these portraits that showed all sorts of… like… beings in them, fighting each other,” Prompto questioned, righting himself in his seat. “What was that about?”

Noctis remembered those paintings. He nearly destroyed one as a kid, in happier times. His attendants spent hours fixing it so his father wouldn’t notice.

“Primarily Messengers, those,” Ignis educated. “Though it’s believed that some of them might have been Astrals instead. We know that Etro is at least one Astral that was erased out of the Cosmogony.”

“Why?” Prompto asked, though he winced after he asked it. “Sorry, they don’t exactly teach a lot of this in school. All we know is that Etro just… is.”

“No one’s really sure,” the king said, shuffling in his seat so he could lay back a little. “My dad used to say that all the Six erased them because they fought against the Six in the Astral War, and that was their punishment, but that doesn’t make any damn sense.”

It didn’t, but Noctis’s father used to say the same. He needed to create new versions of different stories when reading Noctis stories at night, telling him tales to woo him to sleep.

…he missed those days.

The following conversation went in one ear and out the other. Noctis’s mind was racing.

Could it be that the Astrals were still out there, and that Luna could engage them somehow?

Could it be that that would have been key in his own journey in fulfilling the prophecy attached to him when he was a kid?

…if only he could get back to Insomnia, to try to reach Luna…

To be sure, that was one detailed, possibly prophetic dream. Almost as if he was witnessing a real, alternate version of himself and his friends.

…no. That wasn’t possible.

God, he really was just a kid, still.

He hoped Gladio, Iris and Luna were all okay.


End file.
